July was something of a slow month for reading, since I was teaching as summer intensive course and working with my wife on a book-length translation project. That said, I did finish a few books I’d had on the go for a while, and launched into some new ones in August. August wasn’t exactly slow, but I read less than I’d thought I might.
I don’t know what it is about people being outed as monsters right after I’ve read something by them, but the latest was Alice Munro. I tried to read Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage for my book club, and pretty much bailed on it after a couple of stories. I’m afraid the subject matter just did not interest me in the slightest. Learning how monstrous Munro was with her daughter doesn’t incline me to give her another chance—especially since this was far from my first time bouncing off work by Munro. Not that I don’t read work by other dead people who were kind of horrible—I think Brandon Taylor has a point about that—but finding out someone was horrible just makes it easier to give up on their work in those cases where I never cared for it in the first place. (And I’m Canadian, so yes of course I’ve had Alice Munro foisted upon me in plenty of literature classes. I’ve bounced off it every time.)
Kathleen Ann Goonan‘s In War Times is a book I picked up in hardback when it first came out, knowing she was one of the few SF authors out there besides me with a deep interest in jazz music, and knowing this book had a jazz thread running through it. Then… I’m not sure why, but like so many books it sat on the shelf. A few years later, I moved countries and it ended up in a friend’s hands—whether he got it straight from me or secondhand someplace, I’m not sure—but he recently sent it to me, so I finally had the chance to read it. It’s a compelling story about a couple of army tech guys during World War II, one of whom is sucked into a plot to create mysterious devices that seem to do nothing, but which in fact seem to allow glimpses of alternate realities. There’s a subplot involving the protagonist and his army buddy also being musicians who were in New York to witness the birth of bebop (and to try play it themselves), among other things. I’m not sure, as a musician, that all the analogies Goonan made between jazz and physics really make sense, and the climax felt a little out of place to me, but I still liked the book. It’s a big novel, smallish print belying how much is crammed into its three hundred-ish pages, but it pays off on the time investment, especially once we start to see glimpses of the alternate realities where the protagonist and his buddy end up surviving and experiencing different timelines. (People have joked since Trump was elected that we’re in the bad timeline, but Goonan’s novel essentially argues that we’ve been in the bad timeline basically since the sixties, if not since earlier.)
Nick Mamatas’ Sensation was a darkly funny satire exploring a world where, behind the scenes, parasitic wasps and spiders battle for control of everything, humanity included. It spends a lot of time riffing on popular culture from a dozen years ago, and as I read it I was amazed at how much has changed among the terminally online. (That said, if you’d like to be disabsused of the idea it was a more innocent time, this is a good book to check out.) Does it have a plot? Depends on how you define plot, I guess. It does have a bunch of characters drifting into and out of one another’s lives, and a weird unnamed “movement” (and the weirdness that movements bring to the world, and to those who join them, and how people sometimes just inexplicably change on you)… but anyway that movement (Sans Nom, it eventually gets “named”) seems to be the snarling engine of the book. I don’t think it’s his strongest work, but it has stuck around in my mind somehow since I read it.
Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China is another one of the books left behind by my former officemate. Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun bring the receipts in the forms of piles and tons of research. Research enough to suggest that, like the Gin Craze, and the modern drug wars, the drug war over opium seems to have been more about cultural anxieties, projection, and money than about the effects of the drugs themselves. Apparently when smoked, opium was nowhere near as intoxicating as laudanum (the drug on which Europeans based their ideas of opium), and all efforts to combat opium used seemed to lead to use of harder and harder forms of the stuff, addiction to morphine, and more. Along the way, the book discusses medicinal uses of opium (and tobacco, and sometimes both in combination) in Chinese culture, the international and class politics of opium use, and how in turn morphine and other drugs—and finally tobacco—came to replace opium as the popular drug of choice in China and beyond. The authors argue that the banning of opium in China was “the first drug war” which kind of ignores the legislation against gin in England back in the early 1700s during the so-called Gin Craze, but as an account of “an early drug war” it’s revelatory, if a bit academic. (Not that the book doesn’t advertise its academic approach, it’s just something to know going in.)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates was a hell of a listen. (I “read” the audiobook, narrated by the author, and I can’t help but think it adds to the impression it made.) I wonder what it was like to read it before everything that’s happened in the last twelve years—I know I’m late to it, and I think Coates’ writing on this subject is just as potent and timely now as it was in 2011, but I think in 2011 it was easier for “nice white folks” (whom Coates calls “The Dreamers”) were more able to imagine that his perspective was dated and America had dealt with white supremacy already. After the (continuing) lows of Trump, the murder of George Floyd (the most prominent in a long line of murders of Black Americans by thuggish American cops), and the BLM protests that it helped spark, it’s a lot harder to convince oneself that having had a Black president is a major sign of progress. It’s not just the Nazis being out of the woodwork: it’s the rot that’s visible throughout the system. (And I’ll say that while I’m not American, that same rot exists where I’m from too, victimizing both Black and First Nations people alike.) If I had any faith that teachers wouldn’t do their best to defang it, I’d argue this should be assigned reading in high schools. (Some already are, and (predictably) are taking flack from conservatives for it.)
C.L. Moore‘s Jirel of Joiry was recommended by multiple people on different Discords I’m on, so I figured it was time I finally checked it out. I’ve heard a lot about Moore over the years, but this was my first time reading something she hadn’t written with her husband Henry Kuttner. (Well, aside from, “Quest of the Starstone,” which was written with Kuttner.) This is widely seen as a classic of sword & sorcery fiction, and it’s easy to see why: Jirel’s an interesting but none-too-heroic character whose adventures often include visiting strange planes of existence and dealing with terrifying powers. Moore’s sense of how magic should work in swords & sorcery is perfect in my mind: it’s mysterious, dangerous, dark, but also deeply perplexing for her warrior protagonist. The one weak link in the collection is the story Moore cowrote with her husband Harold Kuttner, “The Quest for the Starstone,” which involves a strange crossover with Moore’s other popular series, featuring Northwest Smith. The sci-fi hijinks just really felt out of place, plus the writing was really not up to the level of the other stories, plus a lot of Jirel’s dialogue badly mismatches the kinds of things one expects from Jirel. Even so, the collection was very enjoyable and I’m surprised Moore didn’t write more tales of Jirel.
The Science of Cheese by Michael H. Tunick was another audiobook I checked out in August. What can I say, it’s about cheese. It’s a bit dry, but since I’d read the title before listening to it, that’s exactly what I expected it to be. Drier than any cheese, and probably too much science for a casual listener, the book drowns you in briney knowledge about the production of cheese, right down to what pH level above which cheese isn’t melty. There’s also lots of trivia like why some cheese curds squeak when you eat them, and what, scientificially speaking, is going on when melted cheese stretches. It even covers the etymology of cheese (as well as the names of cheese in dozens of languages), which I found a bit overkill, but that’s just me. If you’re studying this book to make cheese yourself, you’ll probably want a print edition to refer to, unless you have a special reason to prefer audiobook (like, say, a visual impairment). Yes, there is a chapter on making cheese at home, but honestly there are other cheesemaking books that are simpler and easier reference works to start with if you’re making cheese at home. This is more of a grand-picture overview of cheese in all its many forms, from a scientific perspective. A book with a limited audience, I suspect.
Jamie’s America by Jamie Oliver is a cookbook. I normally don’t “read” cookbooks but I did read this one, cover to cover. It’s got some fun observations on American cuisine and culture, and some decent recipes besides, maybe not “authentic” but appealing nonetheless. I’ve tried a few of the recipes; others are going to be tougher to pull off, since I can’t get all the ingredients here in Korea, but I look forward to trying. Oliver sometimes gets into hot water with accusations of “appropriation” (and, like, I can see why) but food is one of those areas where experimentation and recombination has always been a thing, and the recipes in this book are pretty obviously Oliver’s take on local foods in various parts of the States, not intended to be “authentic” or whatever.
I have not much else to say about it, except that I picked it up at a great secondhand bookstore in Cheongju called Ebony and Ivory Books.
Laird Barron’s X’s for Eyes (audiobook) is… weird. It feels like a 1950s mashup between a Hardy Boys novel and Charles Stross’s Laundry Files books, or maybe a Delta Green campaign. Some teenagers in a deeply toxic (indeed, super-villainous) family are forced to struggle with one thing after another as the result of a probe that was sent through an interdimensional portal and contacted some kind of dark, eldritch god on the other side. It’s not like other work by Barron I’ve read—though I haven’t read much—and I have to admit it wasn’t really my thing. I was ready to like it, I gave it a shot, but maybe I just didn’t read enough boys’ adventure novels as a kid for it to resonate for me, I don’t know.
Twilight of the Godlings by Francis Young is an investigation of faerie lore that asks: where the heck do these stories come from? Many historians have long suggested that fae lore represents the veiled survival of pagan religious traditions into the modern day, but Young argues that—while the idea of minor “godlings” has been continuously present in British culture and folk belief, and there perhaps is some slight continuity—the fae were not so much “demoted pagan gods” as they are a kind of counterpoint to the dominant cultural beliefs of Christianity, developed within Christian culture off the chassis of an enduring concept of godlings that has shifted and changed to suit the dominant beliefs and culture of different times. In other words, that fae “traditions” are as invented as any other, mostly in response to contemporary beliefs and social norms: faeries and nymphs aren’t the same, but they’re a similar thought-category that occupy similar niches while serving different purposes in different cultures. (In other words, faerie lore’s relationship to older Roman-era and Iron Age beliefs is that of a Ship of Theseus.)
It’s an extremely scholarly work, perhaps too scholarly for a lot of readers, but if you’re very interested in the topic, it makes for quite interesting reading. I enjoyed it, despite it being heavy going at times.
That’s it for my summer reading.